Pages

When I was a kid, one of my favorite meals was sloppy joes. It had been a long time since I had last had sloppy joes and I had been craving them for a while. Sloppy joes are basically ground beef cooked with onions, a sweetened tomato sauce and various other seasonings and they are served in buns. After looking at a bunch of recipes the common ingredients in the sauce seem to be ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, vinegar, mustard and brown sugar. Now a days I like to add vegetables to anything that I can and I wanted to add some to the sloppy joes. I had some celery in the fridge that needed to be used so I decided to go with my three favorite base forming vegetables, onions, carrots and celery. Next up was the bean decision. There seems to be a bit of controversy as to whether beans should be included in sloppy joes or not and I decided to try them both ways and I split the recipe in half and added beans to one and not the other.
From there you have a bit of playing room with the flavours. The sloppy joes would be great just like that but I was thinking of adding some Texmex flavours and a bit of heat with some smokey chipotle chili powder and some ground cumin. That was the plan anyways. I don't use my ketchup very often and as I was digging to the back of my fridge to get it I came across my
gochujang
(a Korean fermented chili and bean sauce) and I thought that using that in the sloppy joes would be a great idea. So on the spur of the moment I switched from Texmex flavours to Korean flavours.

Of course the sloppy joes were super quick and easy to make. (This meal is easily doable on a weeknight.) The sloppy joe sandwiches were pretty messy, and I really filled those buns with the sloppy joe filling, but they tasted great so the mess was well worth it. I like the way that the gochujang worked in the sloppy joe both with regards to the flavour and to the heat. As for the beans, I enjoyed the version with the beans and I added the second half of the can of beans to the batch without.

Ok, now that looks seriously good, but the eating part... How on earth do you eat a sloppy joe without having everything and I mean everything, falling of the sandwich before you took the first bite? I guess they are called sloppy joe's for a reason! We don't have them here, but I am very tempted to make one (as long as we can eat them outside! lol)

Kevin, kudos for using the gochujang! Us Koreans use it in just about every dish. Sloppy joes bring back memories of grade school lunches... but I would definitely prefers yours! That is one HUGE sandwich, definitely a fork & knife kind of a meal.

I just love switching up the classics. I like your idea of adding Korean flavours, I can see how the two styles would go well together. It looks very moist and sloppy, I think you did a terrific job :)

Beautiful and mouthwatering! I have long wanted to introduce my kids to that great bonfire specialty Sloppy Joes. Yours sounds and looks so delicious, spicy and filled with so many incredible flavors! I do love the addition of kidney beans.

My friends often make sloppy joes-- not completely from scratch, as this is, but they tend to do their own spices. I think they've decided to add cinnamon and chili-cayenne type spices to give it a "Cincinnati" feel.

Post a Comment

About Me

I came to realize that my meals were boring and that I had been eating the same few dishes over and over again for years. It was time for a change! I now spend my free time searching for, creating and trying tasty new recipes in my closet sized kitchen.